A featurette is a motion picture with a running time between a half hour and 50 minutes in length, too short to be labeled a feature and often considered too long to be labelled a film short.
Warner Brothers released several of these between 1953 and 1964. Although the trade periodicals like Film Daily and BoxOffice (magazine) occasionally listed the two-reel “Warner Specials” (actually Technicolor Specials and Broadway Brevities) as “featurettes”, the term usually applied to Warner shorts lasting a full half hour or longer.
Overview
A decade earlier, the studio cut down a Technicolordocumentary, Pledge to Bataan, initially shown at 54 minutes in 1943, and released it as a 20 minute Technicolor Special on February 3, 1945.[2] At the time, theater exhibitors preferred receiving their short films packaged by series.
By the 1950s, however, the success of Walt Disney and others with such series as the True-Life Adventures made the “extra length” short subject fashionable as a double bill presentation. The terms varied according to references, with a longer than usual Deep Adventure occasionally labeled a feature.[3]
Also between 1958 and 1961, Warner Brothers produced four of The Bell Laboratory Science Series for television, but utilizing longtime short film director/writer Owen Crump.